NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND.

NEW

HAMPSHIRE.

Land of the mountain and the flood.

HAT Helvellyn is to the English Lake-land, Mount Washington is to New Hampshire. King-like it stands amidst the White Mountains, its summit often covered with snow. Year by year, thousands of visitors crowd into the Mountain State. All who can afford time and means, leave their homes in the hot Southern States, and come north during summer and autumn. The needle does not tremble more surely to the pole, than do crowds of Southern people come up northward, when dog-days reign in Alabama and the Carolinas.

The Americans are great travellers; by rail and river. Niagara is full of them, Saratoga is full of them; St. John, Halifax, Quebec, and Montreal count them as their most numerous visitors; and they follow each other in beaten tracks all over Europe. Here in New Hampshire, they swarm about Mount Washington. You meet them standing under the Profile Rock, or in common phrase, "Old man of the Mountains ;" you see them threading the pass of the Notch, and by the side of the sparkling Flume, and their shouts reverberate among the hills round "Echo Lake." The giant hotels are full of them, for they are all

visitors of pleasure. Such a thing as a pedestrian tour does not come naturally to an American. He leaves that to his English cousins, whose country can provide for them a village every two or three miles-excellent roads, and now and then a ruined abbey or a manor-house for the curious. "Tell your friends that American ladies won't walk a block, if they can ride," said a Washington lady to me, and her remark is no more than true. Yet I have found American gentlemen who have made pedestrian tours in England, and remembered them with pleasure.

From a New York banker, I heard a curious story, which he assured me was quite true. A man was seized with a mania for strawberries, thinking them as necessary to his well-being as ambrosia to the Gods. So he feasted upon the rich ripe fruit when it made its noviciate appearance in April in New Orleans, and followed the rose and cream-speckled berry from zone to zone, until he was served with the last dish of the season on the banks of the Gatineau river.

In New Hampshire grow the rock-maples, and in the early spring, while yet the snow is on the ground, it is one of the sights to watch the process of maple sugarmaking in the woods.

I have pleasant memories of democratic little Vermont, especially of the pretty town of Burlington, sunning its face on Lake Champlain. Rising up out of the Lake in front, are some bold and naked rocks, at which a British war-vessel fired during one long night in the war of 1814, (mistaking them for vessels,) without ever bringing them to surrender. Old Whiteface is the vis à vis of Vermont on the opposite shore. From its summit, Canada, and the wild regions of Upper New York State are visible.

The democracy of this little Switzerland-Vermont-not only enjoy equal political rights among male citizens, but the time seems fast coming among them when females will have an equal franchise with the males. According to appearances, men will soon have to become Calibans; soon they will search in vain by hearth and home, by fireside and cradle, for their fair ministering angels. American poets, pointing to Professors' Chairs, to Colleges and Parliaments, will sing, "Here woman reigns," not by influence but in person. It is facetiously said in reference to the sexes, that the man holds the reins, but the lady shows him where to drive.

It is no business of ours to scan the future too closely. It may baffle our most certain auguries; but one thing is certain. In America the question of the sexes, the question which shall rule, is being pressed to an issue, in a manner little dreamed of in the Old World. On the shores of Salt Lake, women are as the two sparrows of the parable-but in New England, in San Francisco, in the great West, they are as the golden doves, as the pearl of great price. Year by year the peaceful conflict is surging onward, and with every summer the American woman, counts as nearer by a cycle, the Paradise of her

sex.

Mr. Dixon, in his "New America," has drawn fulllength portraits of the ladies of the land, with all their peculiar theories and habits; and so faithfully has he done the work, that I can give approval and concurrence to all that he says. It is one of those social problems, which if destined to receive solution in the way desired by the fair sex, will soon be settled to their mind. If not so to be in the order of Providence, there will arise a revolution in society, which will sweep away anomalies and restore simplicity of action again. "In God's

universe there is no accident," wrote Charles Sumner to a young friend of mine; and so among all these vexed questions of New America, there is no accident, but a governing law of Providence.

Among the students who gathered to listen to Wendell Phillips's anti-slavery lectures at Harvard University, were many of Southern birth and opinions. They differed from him in belief, but were spell-bound by his eloquence. They were almost convinced against their will. We imagine the same current of feeling running beneath the crusade for Woman's Rights. A woman may be fascinated by the ideas of supremacy, advanced by plausible orators of her sex; but, depend upon it, good sense will step in, and urge as the greatest happiness of life, the performance of true womanly duties; for after all,

Woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse.

From Ticonderoga to Whitehall, Lake Champlain narrows, and for many miles is more like a winding river than a lake, like

Winandermere, the river-lake.

The green rolling hills of Vermont are seen here in all their glory, and make us often think of the Yorkshire more than the Scottish hills. To-day they have poured down their streams in such earnest, that lake and river are swollen to overflowing; and the railway-embankment has been washed away. So I am laid-up high and dry in a little mountain-town. Many of its houses are built on ledges scarped in the rocks on the hill side; there each stands

As an eagle's nest, hangs on the crest

Of purple Appenine.

Castleton is the centre of the Vermont marble-district. Here the beautiful white rock is "plentiful as blackberries; so handy is it for use, that fence-posts and

mechanics' shops are made of it. But if marble is plentiful, beer and spirits are not. Vermont is one of the Maine-law States, a "Cider State" as it is here called. The contraband article may be obtained on the sly, as I witnessed, for while I was dining at the village-inn, my companion William Pollock discovered a fountain of good beer not many yards away; but this is an exception, and the Vermont folks deserve all honour for making temperperance and abstinence the law of their land. So goodbye to Vermont. ‡

MAINE.

Very different is the Maine of the New World, from its namesake, the French province, for which English and French kings so often contended. Much of the land is still covered with forest, and its rivers abound in salmon. One of my forest-experiences was on the northern frontier of this State, when I accompanied Donald McMichael in a canoe, with a couple of Indians as boatmen, to the head-waters of the St. John. Donald was out on an errand of prospecting, not for gold, but for timber. For this timber, when felled, a royalty would be paid to the United States' authorities, and then the logs would be sent to Liverpool, to the firm whose agent my companion was. Far in the interior, wild rivers and mountain-lakes abound. A thousand stories of daring and endurance might be related of the early settlers, who first waged war against the cedars and hemlocks of the forest; and legends innumerable, of Indian strife, could

Maine-law has had a two years' trial in Massachusetts, but did not succeed. Citizens, so-minded, found means to evade its restrictions; and on one occasion the whole of the hotel-keepers in Boston were arrested in one day for breach of the law. A strict licensing-regulation has now taken the place of Maine-law in Pilgrim State, and is preferred by the people.